greatest strength. There are many ways to use your sexuality to your advantage. It doesn’t have to be as obvious as you might think.”
“That’s BS. What was the other one? Tell me.”
Reluctantly, Teddy nods. “It is because you are an artist that this is in you at all,” he stammers, which, in combination with his thick accent, makes him that much harder to understand. “But I warn you that, although you are an artist in this life, you may not have been in other lives. Your soul has spent much longer in the role of the seductress than the artist.”
“Teddy! Just tell me.”
“Your alternative PT, Miss Merchant, is that you will succeed in life by looking closer. Beyond the surface. By asking questions and never accepting things at face value.”
“Looking closer?”
I can’t help but smile a little. It’s exactly right. I feel it immediately, and knowing that Teddy was able to land on this assessment of my strength—a strength that one art curator once commented on—makes me wonder, for the briefest moment, if he was actually somehow in my soul, reading it.
“This might only cause you trouble, Miss Merchant,” Teddy warns.
“It’s perfect. Let’s do it. What do I sign?”
“Very well.” Teddy’s voice shakes as he lifts the form to me. I scribble it down and turn to let him go.
“Not so fast,” he says. Turning back, I find him lifting a long, silvery needle from his case and holding it out to me.
I stare at it. “What’s that?”
“To seal the deal.”
“To what?”
“We seal our official forms with blood at Cania Christy. It’s in my guide.”
“You’re really funny tonight. But you should probably leave now.”
Teddy just holds the needle out to me.
“So we’re in the Middle Ages now?”
“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” Teddy says. “Signing in blood is a tradition of this school, a tradition that goes back generations.” He thrusts the needle at me.
If I was alone, I might actually pinch myself to see if I’m dreaming because, so far, life at Cania Christy feels like life in a bad dream, like life on some planet filled with probing aliens.
“Everyone does it,” Teddy states crossly. Classic that he would use the line teachers and parents have condemned for years.
“My signature isn’t enough?”
“Thou must bequeath it solemnly!” he cries finally. With his hands trembling, with a hysteric gleam in his eye, he stomps on the spot.
“Teddy, come on! I mean, aren’t I supposed to be questioning stuff? That’s my PT, right? If I just gave in, wouldn’t I be, like, in violation or something?”
Settling down, though his chest still heaves, he agrees. “I understand. Well done. But now that you’ve questioned it and learned that it is what you must do, you must do it.”
Mental note: my Guardian will make up the rules as we go.
“What we have here is a learning opportunity,” Teddy declares, taking my hand and pressing the soft pad of my fingertip. “Once you learn who’s in control, I’ll learn that you’re worth fighting for on graduation day.”
With the needle, he pricks my finger and squeezes a drop of my blood onto the lower corner of each form. I press my thumb into the crimson drop; as I pull away, I stare for a moment at the fingerprint I’ve left behind, at the lines that swirl around the center like the walls of some fiery tornado around its funnel, at the mark they use to identify criminals, not students. I look at the tiniest flecks that the lines of my fingerprint leave, and I think of how those ridges are designed to fire signals to the brain when a surface feels dangerously sharp, dangerously hot.
Not long after, Teddy heads to campus for an evening meeting of the Guardians, and, relieved to be alone, I bolt downstairs to the kitchen, where an old-school telephone—the rotary kind, black—clings to the wall. I need to talk to my dad. I need to know how much this place is costing him and if he has any idea he’s sent me to a place where creepy Guardian-people crawl into your soul and suggest you get by in life on your back.
I pick up the receiver for the phone. But there’s no dial tone. A quick glance shows me there’s no cord connecting the two pieces.
“Ten bucks says Teddy took the damn thing with him.”
Restless and still shaken by the PT exercise, I slide on my boots and Gigi’s big, stinky jacket and head out the front door into the night air.
There are two ways I could go: up-island to campus or down-island to the verboten village. Creeping over the grass under the twilight sky and onto the road, I look north at the endless stretch and then south through the haze to where a distant village I’m not supposed to enter sits in wait. Behind me, I can feel the presence of the Zin mansion, where the golden glow of warmly lit rooms fills just enough ornate windows to make me long for a life as pleasant for myself.
I turn left. And, emboldened by my “look closer” PT, walk toward the village.
Taking their cue from the cool weather, the leaves have started changing color. Spots of orange and violet spread through the woods on both sides of the road, their colors diluted by the gray air, which is crisp enough to turn my nose and fingertips red. Outside the village, I spy a craggy wooden sign that shows the population: 212.
My PT may have given me the push I needed to head in this direction, but it hasn’t empowered me to such an extent that I actually intend to go into the village. Given everything I’ve been told today, especially if I want to be valedictorian next year, that would be a career-limiting move worthy of detention, demerits, suspension, or whatever they do at Cania to punish disobedient students. Veering away from the village just as its old pale fishing shacks come into view, I head toward the flash of a lighthouse that passes through the woods on the west side of the island. On my way, I wander by a hillside spotted with enormous Cape Cod–style homes that are anything but what I expected the villagers to live in. These people are the inhabitants of an old whaling village, after all. They should live in shanties with dimly lit porches. They should have tattered clothes that reek of fish guts. And yet, judging by their homes, you’d think they were all millionaires.
“That’s not fair!” a man hollers suddenly. I can’t see him. He’s somewhere far ahead, on the other side of the woods.
For a moment, I worry he’s shouting at me, and I scramble away. But when it’s obvious he doesn’t know I’m here, I inch toward his voice, to the edge of the woods and to the top of a low cliff overlooking not only the vast, smooth ocean and the distant twinkling lights of the Kennebunkport coast but also the marina, which houses more mini-yachts than it seems to be built for. Standing on the dock below me, deep in a fiery conversation, are three men. Two I recognize instantly: Headmaster Villicus and the spectacularly handsome Dr. Zin. But I don’t know who the third man is. He’s Indian, and he looks truly angry—the kind of anger where you expect he might stomp on the spot while
